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This Blogger is a Donkey
Fire Emblem Hacking: it involves a computer, a good deal of time, and the wherewithal to power through the nasty bugs you inevitably create as you try to do cool things. But before I get into that, I need to rant, and I need it bad. Because one of those above elements: my computer, decided to hassle me this week. Gah! What a week. For anyone that’s lost at this point, please, feel free to check out my first post where I explain what Fire Emblem (game) and hacking (action) even is.
Everyone know what we're all about here? Then let’s continue… It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone at this point, but hacking on a mac is a PITA.
No, not the delicious type of pita.
That’s… well it’s a bit more accurate.
The Forbidden Fruit
For a long time now, I hacked using bootcamp. All was well, I had my own happy little virtual Windows 10 machine. That all changed when the MacOS update attacked. The new file system broke several bootcamp features and slowed load times to a crawl. That got old, real fast, so I popped up a copy of Parallels I got from ye olden days as an employee at Greatest Purchase, installed it, and deleted bootcamp. And it worked okay for a time…
Until it didn’t. A few days ago Parallels froze during a Windows update and broke my virtual machine, sending all my projects, including this one, to the dump because I wasn’t actively backing up to a web host or flash drive. My son ripped my last FE hacking flash drive in half, so it’s been a bit of a double whammy, and a lesson unlearned for me, apparently.
This story contains one valuable lesson to you, though, dear reader: Backup and backup often. Learn from my mistakes. Throw your important project data in a file that syncs with Google Drive, Dropbox, or some other cloud server. Just do it.
Seriously
But you didn’t come here for parables about the importance of data redundancy! It’s time to make a new character in FE8! So fire up that FEBuilder app and let’s get down and dirty with our Character Editor.
The Nonspecific Basic Essentials
This is probably the most straightforward editor and is basically the good old character editor nightmare module. On steroids. Unfortunately, FEBuilder isn’t displaying quite right in my app because of my new circumstance involving Wine (if only I meant the drink), but the important thing is that they’ll display right and function properly for you.
For this post I’m going to zoom in on elements that will be recurring in future editors because I think it’s important to understand these elements, but they won’t be mentioned after this point.
Along the left-hand side we have our list. This feature is repeated for most FEBuilder tools. Always make sure that the data you want to replace matches the selected element (unit in this case) of the list. For this example, we’re going to get Eirika outta this game. No more totally platonic sibling love for this FE8 hacker, thank you very much.
We’ll get back to making this ROM less disgusting in the next post, never fear.
A Nonspecific Hex Upon You
This is the starting address of our table. As you scroll through the list on the left, you’ll notice that this number doesn’t change. Beside it you’ll notice a Count field with 255 displayed. This is the number of elements (units) in our list. 255 is the maximum a single byte can reach (0-9,A-F), and our unit list is, unfortunately, restricted to a single byte input by default. There are lists that are larger, such as portraits, but that’s for another time.
* Address. It has the same number as Hex Address in the above image, but that’s only for the first element (unit) in the table. What this represents is the starting address for any element (unit) you’ve selected.
* Size. This number is how many bytes comprise each element of the list. In this case, we have a 255 element list x 52 bytes per element for a list total of 13,260 bytes. FEBuilder largely handles this information for us, but it can be very valuable to know if you ever feel like overwriting any hex by hand or copying sections of data.
* Selection. Selection tells you which of the 52 bytes you have currently selected. It’s got a similar use to the previous two, just more narrow. Note that while Size uses standard numerical order, Selection uses Hexadecimal, so the 0x31 that I have selected is actually byte 49+1 (Because we start at 0) so 50.
* Write to ROM. Write to ROM is going to be your new best friend. It becomes yellow after any changes you’ve made to your currently selected element and as long as it remains yellow, some portion of your changes haven't been written. You’ll find out really quickly that your changes aren’t actually going through if you don’t hit that Write to Rom button (or just use a keybind). While FEBuilder does warn you if you haven’t wrote to ROM before exiting the open tool, it doesn’t warn you that changing elements before writing to ROM won’t save your data. So write write write.
Then write some more. Huh, never thought I’d be able to use the most common writing advice out there for something like this. The next post will come either tomorrow or Sunday as it's already written and is essentially the second half of this post. Who'd have thought that character editor would run me almost 2000 words. Anyway, has anyone else done something that you really knew better than doing like me when it comes to being data savvy? What's your horror story? Let me know in the comments. Until then, I'm Shindad the Great, and you're pretty awesome, too.